sing of Erlangen.

* * * * *

We have already called attention to the tenth edition of BROCKHAUS'S
_Conversations-Lexikon_, now publishing serially at Leipzig. The
twenty-first part is before us, and we again take occasion to commend
the work to our readers. We know no other encyclopaedia which compares
with it in universal excellence and utility, and this edition is a great
improvement upon its predecessors. In the biography of living personages
of distinction it is especially rich; in this respect alone it deserves
to be found in the libraries even of those who own the earlier editions.
The biographies of American statesmen and scholars are given with detail
and correctness.

* * * * *

A work which may be of some interest to the belles-lettres antiquarian,
has just been published by Schmidt, of Halle: _The Sources of Popular
Songs in German Literature_. Such a performance is more necessary for
the songs of Germany than for those of any other nation, since no where
else is there so much which really requires explanation to the moderns.

* * * * *

A most agreeable book is _Schiller and his Paternal House_, lately
published at Stuttgart, by Herr SAUPE. The great poet is here depicted
in the midst of his father's family, all of whom loved him dearly, and
respected as much as they loved.

A Hamburg journal says a good and sharp word about the mania of the
Germans for hunting up the literary remains of Goethe and Schiller. The
volumes of memoirs, correspondence, diaries, and other relics of these
great men, would make a library far exceeding in quantity all the
volumes they published themselves. Nothing so much proves the absence of
great and significant persons in the literature of the present day as
this almost convulsive clinging to the immortal deceased, and the
endless endeavor to talk and write about them, and publish every thing
that can be twisted into a connection with their history or writings.
Presently we shall hear of the republication of the school-books they
studied, with all the thumb-marks and pot-hooks then scribbled by the
future great men. This is said on occasion of DOeRING'S _Schiller and
Goethe_, which the writer thinks might as well have been unwritten.

* * * * *

The number of books on military subjects published in Germany, must
astonish the American not accustome